Social media companies have been hard at work to make sure they play a helpful rather than harmful role in disseminating news and information about the coronavirus pandemic. Today, Twitter took an extra step beyond its own platform to put its efforts into the wider, already under-pressure world of journalism. Twitter announced that it would
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As companies that used to having workers in the same building struggle to find ways to work from home, one company that has been remote from Day One is GitLab . It recently published a handbook to help other companies who are facing the work-from-home challenge for the first time. Lest you think GitLab is
ePlane, described as a B2B sourcing and business intelligence platform for the aerospace parts and repair market, has raised $9 million in funding. The round is led by Japanese trading and investing company Marubeni Corporation, along with a number of previous investors. Founded in 2016 and launched fully in 2018, ePlane has built to let
There’s a global shortage of available protective equipment (PPE) and medical supplies for use by frontline responders working to fight the spread of the novel coronavirus, and the Frontline Responders Fund wants to channel donations to help address that shortage. The fund, which is seeking public donations via GoFundMe, will use all proceeds to cover
Apple has released software updates for the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, the Apple TV and the Mac. The biggest changes are on the iPad. Starting today, you can pair a mouse or trackpad with your iPad and use it to move a cursor on the display. Apple unveiled trackpad support for iPadOS when
Meet Imatag, a French startup that has been working on a watermarking product. Watermarking is nothing new, but the company has found a way to mark images even if they are resized, cropped, edited or compressed. Many photographers and brands watermark their photos so that you can see who’s the original source when the photo
When activist investors Starboard Value took a 7.5% stake in Box last September, there was reasonable speculation that it would begin to try and push an agenda, as activist investors tend to do. While the firm has been quiet to this point, today Box announced that Starboard was adding three members to the 9 member
Disney+, the streaming service from the Walt Disney Company, has been rapidly ramping up in the last several weeks. But while some of that expansion has seen some hiccups, other regions are basically on track. Today, as expected, Disney announced that it is officially launching across 7 markets in Euopre — but doing so using
Smart thermometer maker Kinsa has been working on building accurate, predictive models of how seasonal illnesses like the flu travel in and among communities — and its fever map is finding new utility as the novel coronavirus pandemic grows globally. While Kinsa’s US Health Weather Map has no way of tracking the spread of COVID-19
Over-the-top live TV streaming service fuboTV announced today it plans to merge with the virtual entertainment technology company, FaceBank Group. The proposed merger would retain the name fuboTV for the combined company, consisting of fuboTV’s direct-to-consumer live TV streaming platform and FaceBank’s technology IP in sports, movies and live performances. FaceBank is not a household
The vicissitudes of social distancing have taken many people by surprise, making video calls a new necessity for distant socializing. But which of the two dozen apps out there should you and your (perhaps not as tech-savvy) friends and family use? Here are our recommendations, whether it’s for a coffee meeting, a family get-together, or
For much of the history of enterprise technology, companies tended to buy from a single vendor because it made managing the entire affair much easier while giving them a “single throat to choke” when something went wrong. On the flip side, it also put customers at the mercy of said vendor — and it wasn’t
Facebook is temporarily downgrading the quality of video streaming in Europe on its social platforms Facebook and Instagram in response to a call for action from the European Commission, per Reuters. Disney has also said it will work to shrink bandwidth used by its streaming service, Disney+, which is due to begin launching in Europe
Startups continue to find new ways to contribute to ongoing efforts to fight the global spread of COVID-19 during the current global coronavirus pandemic, and personal health hardware-maker Oura is no exception. The smart ring startup is working with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) on a new study to see if its device
Earlier this month, the FCC issued a new measure aimed at easing some of the burdens on consumers as COVID-19 continues to have an increasingly profound impact on nearly every aspect of life. Most or all major internet and wireless providers in the U.S. signed up for the pledge, agreeing to take actions like waiving
Planet 13 is located blocks off the Las Vegas Strip and holds the title as the world’s largest cannabis dispensary. But it’s much more than just a storefront. There’s a lot to the 115,000-square-foot facility, including entertainment, restaurants and cannabis processing equipment where the company makes edibles and drinks. This is a destination, Vegas-style. In
For now, the late-stage venture world simply isn’t as bad as we expected Alex Wilhelm 8 hours Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This morning we’re taking a look at mega-rounds: funding events of $100 million or more. What’s fun about these
Big tech has been making a huge effort to mobilize its power to help people work better together to battle the ongoing coronavirus pandemic — whether it’s creating search and information portals or making sure the most authoritative voices are surfacing above the noise, or gathering compute power to supercharge research efforts to find vaccines.
When designers need to collaborate with other teams, they can currently turn to products like InVision and Zeplin. But Ceros creative director Jack Dixon said there’s a “pretty interesting gap in the market” — once you move beyond prototypes and start working with websites that are either live or in staging, the process starts to
The European Parliament will temporarily allow electronic voting by email as MEPs are forced to work remotely during the coronavirus crisis. A spokeswoman for the parliament confirmed today that an “alternative electronic voting procedure” has been agree for the plenary session that will take place on March 26. “This voting procedure is temporary and valid
Germany’s Global Savings Group (GSG), the e-commerce content company, has acquired French cashback company iGraal for €123.5 million in a mixture of cash and stock. Specifically, the deal was reached with iGraal’s majority owner M6 Group, and consists of €35 million in cash and the remaining made up of an exchange of shares. The acquisition
Enable, a U.K. startup that has developed a cloud-based “rebate management solution” to help distributors, manufacturers and retailers manage rebates, is announcing $13 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sierra Ventures. As part of the investment, Menlo Ventures’ Steve Sloane has joined the Enable board. Founded
The rapid spread of the coronavirus pandemic has put a freeze on many in-person sales and transactions for goods and services, so in what might be a sign of the times for funding in the startup world, today a company in the UK that’s been building a portal to carry out car sales in the
The COVID-19 virus is touching every aspect of our lives and having a profound impact on individuals, businesses and society at large. Box’s Aaron Levie has built a successful business from dorm room to IPO and beyond. He spoke to TechCrunch today about the level of creativity and focus that it’s going to take to
Long and short distance travel have all but stopped for many people at the moment. But looking forward to a time when that may no longer be the case, a company designing flying taxis is today announcing a large round of funding to help continue developing its product. Lilium, a Munich-based startup that is designing
We’ve been diligently following the development of virtual worlds, also known as the “metaverse,” on TechCrunch. Hanging out within the virtual worlds of games has become more popular in recent years with the growth of platforms like Roblox and open-world games like Fortnite, but it still isn’t a mainstream way to socialize outside of the
Following similar moves by Lime, Bird, Tier and others, Voi Technology, the European e-scooter rentals and so-called micro-mobility startup, says it has “paused” operations in several countries due to the Coronvirus pandemic. This sees the company suspend operations in all but nine key cities. In a short statement issued to media on Friday, Voi said
Google says Coronavirus has become its biggest search topic by a country mile this year, and to continue its efforts to harness that attention in the best possible way, late on Friday the company launched a new information portal dedicated to the pandemic as well as an improved search experience for desktop and mobile. The
Right now the world is at war. But this is no ordinary war. It’s a fight with an organism so small we can only detect it through use of a microscope — and if we don’t stop it, it could kill millions of us in the next several decades. No, I’m not talking about COVID-19,
The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains